Christine Byrch, Kate Kearins, Markus Milne and Ri

Sustainable ‘What’?
A Cognitive Mapping Approach to Understanding Sustainable Development

This paper employs a cognitive mapping technique to explore the meaning of sustainable development held by twenty-one New Zealand ‘thought leaders’ and ‘influencers’ promoting sustainability, business or sustainable business. These participants’ maps illustrated disparate levels of detail and complexity, with from 3 to 51 concepts generated and sorted into a variety of structures. Participants promoting business generally held a technocentric approach to sustainable development emphasising the economic domain and the present, and accepting economic growth and development as the key to sustainable development. An ecocentric approach to sustainable development with an emphasis on the environmental domain, the future, limits to the Earth’s resources, and achievement through various radical means, was more commonly articulated by those promoting sustainability. Those participants promoting sustainable business held elements of both technocentric and ecocentric worldviews, combining emphasis on the environmental domain, focus on the present, and achievement of sustainable development by various reformist means. These results led to two key observations. First, such divergence of opinion as to what connotes sustainable development across even a small sample does not bode well for its achievement. Second, a clearer elucidation of the worldview of the promoters of sustainable business points to the need to consider more carefully the origins and implications of environmentalism and other aspects of sustainability integrated into a business agenda.

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